Long queues in Singpore for pork jerky

Eddie Yap’s mother gave her son an ultimatum as he left on his day off to join the queue for “bak- kwa,” or flat sheets of barbequed pork, in Singapore’s Chinatown district: Don’t come back without it.

“She has been eating this brand for more than 10 years,” said Yap, 23, a Singapore Air Force trainee. “I’m going to get 14 kilos (31 pounds).”

Each traditional New Year, the Dutch eat donuts, the French bake brioche, the Japanese slurp red noodles and the Irish bury a ring in a cake. In Singapore, a new lunar year means queuing to buy packets of the salty-sweet pork for family reunions. Buyers suffer the baking sun, tropical rainstorms and this year, a new deterrent that has pummeled consumers — inflation.

Rising global energy and food prices and a jump in the nation’s property market in 2007 have pushed up prices at the fastest rate in a quarter of a century. Bak-kwa has risen as much as 16 percent from last year because of higher pork and oil prices.

Still, that hasn’t deterred many from seeking out their favorite brand of the delicacy to celebrate the arrival of the year of the rat.

“Of course it’s expensive, but it’s once a year and a must for Chinese New Year,” said Chua Geck Swee, 70, a retired civil servant who traveled an hour by bus and train to buy bak-kwa for his six grandchildren. “I’ve been eating this brand for 40 years. I know people who pay students and retirees to queue for them.”

More than 200 people lined up outside the Chinatown outlet of Lim Chee Guan on Feb. 4, three days before the start of the new lunar year. Rod Lim, the store’s 57-year-old owner, imposed a 15-kilogram cap on purchases this week after turning away customers willing to pay S$50 ($35) a kilogram for his traditional bak-kwa, a 70-year-old recipe of his father’s.

Lim uses pork from the hind leg and the foreleg of the pig for his bak-kwa, which is marinated and barbecued to ensure the meat is “juicy and tender, even if you keep it for a few days.”

He competes with three other big bak-kwa sellers in Chinatown, though there are hundreds of smaller retailers across the island, where about 70 percent of the 4.6 million population are Chinese.